Tag: sales

Permission marketing

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Permission Marketing is a book (and an idea) by Seth Godin that is 20 years old this year. And yet, its message is still so powerful and actual.

Permission is the opposite of interruption.

With traditional media, people’s attention is constantly interrupted with an advertisement, that basically asks them to focus on something they did not want to focus on in the first place. It is an invasive form of doing marketing, and the customer is powerless as the choice is little: whether you are watching television, listening to the radio, driving home after work, your entertainment and train of thoughts is subjected to messages that are short, catchy and completely not requested.

With the Internet and the multiplication of information (and of promotional messages), Godin argues that there is a new possible way to do marketing. A way that aims at establishing a long term relationship with your target audience. A way that is respectful of and empowering for the customer. A way that is possible because, after all, the Internet is not a mass media, but a niche media, “the biggest direct marketing platform that ever exhisted”.

This is permission marketing. Instead of running ads to the mass, you seek to craft a message that resonates with some people (your audience), so that they consent to hear from you again. Permission marketing has three key characteristics.

  • It is anticipated, as people long for it, they want more. They ask “what happened?” if you stop sending them messages.
  • It is personal, or at least it reflects a need for self-identification, and as such it resonates deeply with the wanted identity of the receiver.
  • It is relevant, as it is supposed to be just what the receiver was looking for.

The message is still relevant, as the way we use the Internet today as marketers is much more similar to the way you would use a mass media.

Our inherent laziness makes us believe that by running ads, everywhere, to everyone, and by scaling them when our budget increases, we can actually be successful. And sometimes, that is the case. Yet more often than not, we end up being ignored.

The ironic thing is that marketers have responded to this problem with the single worst cure possible. To deal with the clutter and the diminished effectiveness of Interruption Marketing, they’re interrupting us even more!

Seth Godin

Permission marketing is a long-term effort (Godin compares it to dating to find a life-time partner, while interruption marketing would be more like clubbing) and it consumes one of the scarcest resources in a world that lives at the speed of life: patience. The final result, though, is the creation of a tribe, a passionate relationship with our people that can last forever. Or at least, until we end up betraying the trust we have been given.

 

 

There is no such thing as a free social media platform

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We are hitting our heads against a wall.

For years, we have believed in the myth of “free”. Listening to music was free, watching a video was free, posting your piece of content was free. Whether you were an individual or a company, you could get in front of a fairly wide audience with a very small investment of energy and time, and essentially without spending any money. And of course, as we were getting blinded by the allure of “free”, we forgot about a very important fundamental.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Even when things appear to be free, they are not.

While we have not paid a dime to publish and distribute our content for the past decade or so, we have most likely contributed to the impoverishment of our society and to the extremization of the public discourse.

Furthermore, as marketers we keep banging our heads against the wall every time a platform curbs our potential to reach our audience (current or wanted). We might just understand and accept that those platforms do not exist to allow us to spread our message to whoever we want. And instead we first spend weeks over weeks complaining about how our posts used to get 1000 and now gets 200. Then, we try to game the algorithms, we hack a bit further to try to squeeze more, we ask strangers of dubious reputation to publish or click on links just to try to increase our content’s rank, we use shortcuts to boost metrics that have absolutely no business relevance.

The basics of marketing have been the same for decades, and if we manage to stop our head just for a second, we can see that is what still matters nowadays.

  1. Understand who your audience is.
  2. Ask what they need help with.
  3. Match your product or service to the help needed.

The rest is noise. It distracts us from achieving things that matter and from delivering meaningful change.

The trap of doing

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Urgency is a myth, so before you start taking action, make sure you understand what you are acting upon.

In marketing, for example, it is very easy to fall in the trap of doing. You start a new job, there is a pressure to get more visits to the website, more content, more leads, and so you begin with tactical actions already on your second week on the job (if you have been good enough to last that long). You do not know anything about the customer, very little about the product, even less about your colleagues, what they do, what their challenges are, and why you are in the job in the fist place.

No wonder many are dissatisfied with their marketing efforts. There is a reason if tactics, channels, messages change all the time, while strategic marketing is essentially the same from decades. Start with the basics, make sure you clearly understand who you are serving (internally and externally), and what you can do for them. Where they are found, why they should care, whether there are alternative solutions to their pains and why yours is better.

If your boss does not understand that, you might be in the wrong place. You need to build solid foundation if you want to build anything that stands the test of marketing fads.

What marketing is not

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The inability to listen. The idea that by interrupting and telling your story people will be amazed. The practice of segmenting into hundreds of small niches to feed them whatever they want today. The ideas of optimization, hacking, ranking, fans and followers. The belief that data is better than interactions. The effort to second-guess needs and wants to stay clear of the risk of asking. The easy shortcut of personalised and automated user journey. The unrelentless focus on growth.

Marketing is not ruining the world. The things above are. And at the same time they set expectations, both for marketers and customers, that cannot be met, leading to inevitable dissatisfaction.

Key insights and themes from the research include:

  • Data is a dilemma. But “big data” isn’t marketing’s biggest challenge. It is actually the “small data” – the data used to describe the small, specific attributes delivered directly from the customer through, as an example, the Internet of Things. 36 percent of respondents believe that small data will be the greatest challenge for the organization.
  • We’ve lost the ability to be human, and we can’t blame the machines. Some 41 percent admit that they are overly focused on driving campaigns, forgetting that they are building relationships. Nearly 30 percent admit they think of their customers in terms of targets, records and opportunities – interestingly an equal amount admit that they are also struggling to define and deliver returns from customer experience strategies.
  • Going small could bring our humanity back. Marketers believe small data will help extract better signal from the noise (45 percent), reveal the “why” behind customer actions and behaviors (41 percent), help focus on the people behind the data to deliver more human interactions (35 percent) and aid in filling key gaps across the customer journey (35 percent.)

CMO Council Research

 

We know what to do

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We know what to do in most situations.

We know that when we approach a potential customer, we should focus on their story, not on our.

We know that when we plan which channels to use for our marketing tactics, we should be selective and carefully craft our messages.

We know that culture eats strategy for breakfast, and that employees are attracted by purpose and leadership, and that losing a talented person is much worse than losing the manager that made them quit.

We know we should be nice with each other, do not fill our calendars with appointments, be respectful of other people’s agendas, avoid showing up late and being distracted by our phone when somebody is sharing something with us.

We know a great deal of things. And yet, most of us fail at the same very things.

There are different reasons why this is so. It’s certainly partly due to our laziness. Partly it’s the fact our focus is misplaced. Partly it’s because we get carried away and we lose control.

And the biggest part, is us feeling we are special. There’s certainly something we know and that all others before us have missed. Our situation is unique, and we will succeed where everybody else has failed. This time, this time only, it is going to be different, and the rest of the world is going to see what I am, where I am at, why it’s important and follow me blindly.

Open your eyes. That is (almost) never the case. If you just stick to doing it, you will still end up a whole lot better off. And people around you will as well.